Is there a minimum language school course length to switch from a student visa to designated activities (job hunting) visa?

5 comments

1. This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.

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   **Is there a minimum language school course length to switch from a student visa to designated activities (job hunting) visa?**

   I’m thinking about doing a 6 month language school and then wanting to job hunt on a designated activities visa (and would be job hunting while studying as well). The MoJ site just says you can switch if you graduated a language school so I’m not sure if finishing any course length counts as “graduating” or if it needs to be like a year.

   I am 30 years old and from California and am pretty adamant on wanting to move to Tokyo. I have visited for a couple of 3 week tourist vacations, and visited Tokyo many times on shorter 5 day weekend trips for concerts and events like once every 2-3 months for the past year and a half. I would much rather just live there.

   I do have a bachelors and 5 years of experience as a software engineer. My Japanese is at the basic conversation level (only a couple uni Japanese courses many years ago and some self study). I would definitely rather be directly hired to move to japan, and have tried applying for jobs on Tokyo-dev for English only roles, but have not had much luck getting interviews. And I have had recruiters on Michael Page and similar sites say the current market is very tough for applying from outside of japan if you aren’t an amazing candidate.

   My plan is to use this as a much needed break from my current job and use some of my extra time to work on side projects/open source projects to be a little more marketable. And hopefully being in japan and showing I can live in Japan would help as well. Though the gap on my resume is a negative for sure, I think a 6 month to a year gap isn’t insurmountable when I have 5 YoE even if I have to move back to California.

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2. You are allowed to job hunt on a student visa. So if you start your search early on, in theory you should be able to change form student to work visa directly.

3. This really is a question for the Japanese school that you are thinking of attending, but it is unlikely that a six month program will work for what you want.

   First, many of the six month study programs are for tourists and you don’t need/can’t get a student visa for them. Switching from a tourist visa to designated activities is not possible.

   Second, many of the schools that offer short-term courses are not registered with the Ministry of Justice, i.e., the Immigration Bureau, which is why they can’t get you a student visa. They are not considered a ‘proper’ school. You won’t be able to ‘graduate’ from one of these types of schools.

   Third, a lot of these short-term programs have flexible start/end dates allowing students start and finish the program whenever is convenient for them. For example, the classes start at the beginning of every month and finish at the end. Because of this flexibility, a student doesn’t finish, i.e., graduate, so much as they just stop attending. Students can attended for one month or three or six or anything in between.

   The final thing is that in order to get a designated activities visa you have to have a letter of recommendation from the school that you attended. The policies regarding who the school recommends are not legally mandated and therefore can be set by each individual school. Which is why you need to check with them. They may not be willing to recommend you to immigration for a designated activities visa if you have only completed a short course.

   Good luck!

4. Following as I have a similar plan, but with attending language school for 1 year instead

5. I’m not sure about specifics given the length of your course and your age, but [here are the requirements from MOJ](https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/applications/status/designatedactivities14.html) for the special activities for job hunting purposes residence permission.

   Some of the important distinctions particularly for language school students:
   – Must have graduated from an overseas university
   – Must submit a certification of your attendance record at the language school
   – Must submit a recommendation letter from your language school (schools aren’t required to offer them, so this is something you’d have to inquire about before admission)
   – Must submit documents that demonstrate you’ve been job hunting before asking for the residence change
   – Must have regular meetings with/regularly submit information about your job hunting results to your language school *after* graduation
   – Language school itself must meet a number of specific requirements including offering official job hunting support, offering a job hunting language course, and demonstrating how they plan to hold regular interviews with you upon graduation

   Even in the best circumstances, it seems like a really difficult hurdle to overcome. I can’t imagine a language school would be willing to jump through so many hoops particularly if you’re only registered to be a student there for 6 months. Personally, I think you’re better off extending your enrollment length and/or starting your job hunt immediately upon arrival in Japan.